Two excellent books - that should be mandatory reading for Middle East FAOs - are Victoria Clark's Dancing on the Heads of Snakes and Steve Caton's Yemen Chronicle. Victoria provides an excellent recent history along with a recounting of her interviews with political and tribal leadership. Steve's book is an ethnography based on his experiences researching poetry and mediation during tribal conflicts. Perhaps the best anthropological work on Yemen; it is highly readable and flows like a well-crafted travel essay.

Greetings to all FAOs and others with interest in Yemen [ahem] "things Yemeni."

In addition to the posted articles and book recommendations in this thread, may I mention the availability from one of the better-stocked Arabic bookstores in the US (this particular one is in the "Little Arabia" section of Orange County, California) of four additional Arabic-language, and detail-loaded, books on Yemen:

1. Encyclopedia of the Country of Yemen and Yemeni Tribes
[Two volumes, 1943 pages, hardbound, co-published in Sana'a and Beirut, 2002]

2. Military History of Yemen [to 1967], Beirut [hardbound], 2007

3. Memoirs of the commander of an Egyptian Army infantry battalion which was a contingent of the EG expeditionary force deployed to Yemen in 1967

4. Memoirs [translated from the Russian into the Arabic] of a Soviet diplomat based in Aden [then in South Yemen, former PDRY] during the late 1960-early 1970s (The author seems to have spent much of his tour with watching and trying to defame or deprecate the activities of a rival group of military advisors and trainers from China [PRC variety] also operating in the country.)

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